The Private Display

This thing has a 2001 time tag on it, so chances are that it’s been around already. Nevertheless, it’s resurfacing now and it’s worth a second look.

It’s an apparently undeveloped project by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories called the “Privacy Enhanced Computer Display”. The short of it is, you wear special glasses that allow you to see what’s on the screen. Everyone else around you sees radioactive purple people eaters on strike.

The long… well, it’s like this. The special monitor refreshes at a high rate. Only a few of the frames contain actual data. The others contain garbage. So, to someone without the glasses, they’ll see mostly white noise. The glasses however are synchronised with the monitor so that they’ll block out the screen for those frames that are garbage and let through the frames with actual data. It’s a little like what they do at Imax with the special 3D glasses.

So, there you have it. Don’t know that this actually ever went anywhere, but you can read all about it here. Story VIA Digg.

Forgot where I read about it a few weeks ago, but a similar thing was done to a Laptop screens. The outer polarizing layer was removed from the screen making it appear all white when viewed with the naked eye. Only when wearing glasses with a polarizing filter (in the right angle) you could see the contents of the screen. Anyone have a link to this?

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